'Django Unchained' Comic-Con Panel in 15 Quotes

Quentin Tarantino's movie "Django Unchained" doesn't come out until Christmas Day, but its panel discussion at Comic-Con San Diego provided some of the best moments of the annual convention. Here are the 15 best quotes from the panel, which included Tarantino cast members Jamie Foxx, Walton Goggins, Don Johnson, Christoph Waltz and Kerry Washington.

1 Tarantino: "The initial germ of the whole idea was a slave who becomes a bounty hunter and then goes after overseers who are hiding out in plantations. From that point on, other things came to it, and it became a love story about him trying to find his wife, but that initial thing 13 years ago was a slave who becomes a bounty hunter who hunts white people -- before the Civil War."

2 Tarantino, on how he approached the style of the movie: "It can't be much more outrageous than it was in real life. It can't be more surrealistic than it was in real life. It can't be more outrageous than it was in real life. It was fucked up. And it was bad. Frankly, it was surrealistic. It's unimaginable to think of the pain and the suffering that went on in this country. Hence, making it perfect for a Spaghetti Western interpretation of this entire story."

3 Waltz: "This is a different relationship than someone picking up a slave and rescuing him. No, no, no. This is a unique and fabulous relationship that is forged in the course of fantastic adventures. We're talking about a Spaghetti Western, and I find it sensational that Italian directors imported a genre to Italy to forge a new thing -- Spaghetti Westerns -- and then an American director comes and takes the new thing and brings it back to America."

Andrew Cooper/The Weinstein Company

4 Tarantino: "I actually didn't do a movie about a slave. I might do a movie about a slave one day. The character starts off as a slave. I was interested in a slave narrative. I was interested in a story that took place in the Antebellum South and that brutal time and actually having a black character having to negotiate through that time. But to me one of the fun things, exciting things about telling the story was to take the Western genre that we know so well and have seen so often… and place it in the Antebellum South and put a black character at the center of it… the way that you don't see, the way that Westerns bend over backwards to not deal with slavery."

5 Tarantino, on making Waltz's character a dentist: "It wasn't lost on me that Doc Holliday was a dentist…. I wanted to make [Waltz's character, Dr. King Schultz] a doctor. I couldn't make him a doctor of philosophy and I didn't want to make him a sawbones. The idea that he could hide in plain sight… he has his dentist's wagon. He has a reason for showing up into places. I liked that 'hiding in plain sight' aspect."

6 Tarantino, on showing the full eight-minute industry sizzle reel at Comic-Con: "There was a whole talk when we were coming down here, 'Well, we shouldn't show them that much footage. It might get out and we don't want that to happen. Let's just do a four-minute reel of this and that and the other.' And I was like, 'No! No, no, no. The people at Comic-Con have been waiting for this for a long time. We're probably going to have this hall, like, jam-packed. They've probably been waiting in line a long time. They should see the whole -- I'm cool with my footage. We've got more coming.' I decided if this is good enough for the industry, it's good enough for the fans."

"I was actually very grateful that my character had to do two things that I had never done before -- horseback riding and speaking German -- mostly because this film scared the shit out of me." -- Kerry Washington

7 Goggins, on his character, Billy Crash: "It's not like where the actor can sit up here and make an argument for [the character] having any kind of redeeming values. He's a ruthless dude."

10 The moderator: "You realize we have both Crockett [Johnson] and Tubbs [Foxx] in the same movie?"

11 Johnson: "On and off the screen."

12 Johnson, on how he got his character Big Daddy's voice: "I studied a lot of Foghorn Leghorn."

13 Waltz, on helping Washington learn German: "One day in rehearsal, Kerry came to me and said she's never spoken German and then she worked with someone who taught her the beginnings of a rather difficult language by singing children's songs, and she sang one of the most beautiful lullabies that exists in the German culture from the early 19th Century. So it was even period. And she sang it so that I almost started crying -- and I hate to admit that I started crying."

14 Washington: "I was actually very grateful that my character had to do two things that I had never done before -- horseback riding and speaking German -- mostly because this film scared the shit out of me. I tend to gravitate toward things that scare me because I feel it will help me grow creatively. When the ball started rolling I was a little bit paralyzed on how to step into the brutal world that Broomhilda [her character] had to exist in and survive in. And really devoting myself to studying the German every single day… and studying the horseback riding… those things kept me connected to the world when I just wanted to stay under the covers and hide."

15 Tarantino, on recently adding Jonah Hill to the cast: "We just got finished shooting his stuff last week. He's in a sequence with Don. They're not the Ku Klux Klan because the Ku Klux Klan came about after the Civil War to 'keep black folks in line' after they got their freedom. But the predecessors to the Ku Klux Klan was a group of people called the Regulators. They were there to keep slaves in line, find them if they escaped, keep them from escaping and terrorize them, basically. And it's a regulator raid that's being led against Django and Schultz. I'll let everyone be the judge, but it starts off as if it's going to be very scary and intense. And then they have this sequence that's about the funniest thing I've ever written. It's right up there with handing out the color names in 'Reservoir Dogs.'"